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Recently I received an e-mail from a reader who had purchased my eBook and had some follow-up questions. One of the main ones he asked was my take on Squidoo for creating a landing page for an affiliate offer.

Squidoo is nothing new and has been around for several years. In fact, it’s one of the first places I made a landing page when I was starting out. It’s great for beginners and features an easy to use editor for simple implementation of web elements. You can literally have a website up and running in a few minutes and begin sending traffic to it immediately.

The service is free and basically allows you to network with others in your niche. It’s also very search engine friendly and ranks highly among Google and Yahoo. The secret, though, is to choose a niche with not too much competition and pick your keywords wisely. I always recommend at least five good keywords to start with and then build more sub-keywords using a mind map. Brainstorming is key when creating a new landing page, as you want to make sure you have all your bases covered.

Squidoo is not something I highlight in my eBook, as it’s not really used by many of the top Internet marketers (or myself), as we tend to use specific domains on our own servers for landing pages. However, if you’re on a tight budget and don’t have much seed money to play with, Squidoo is perfectly fine for you.

Once you decide on your niche, search some affiliate networks, like MarketLeverage of ClickBank for offers you want to promote. Set up a landing page and use the Google keyword tool to help narrow down your keywords. Building a landing page around those keywords and work to get your lens (that’s what Squidoo pages are called) to the top of the search engines.

Tip: Speaking of Squidoo — and this is just a pure coincidence — ClickBank sent out a tip in their newsletter as I was typing up this post.

Type the following into a Google search:
“add+to+this+list”+site:squidoo.com

You will be presented with a huge list of Squidoo lenses where you can add your site, with custom anchor text. Many of these have very high PageRank as well!

For extra credit, append +”keyword phrase” onto the end of this query, and you can target your links for relevance. For example, if you were trying to rank a fitness site you could type:
“add+to+this+list”+”fitness”+site:squidoo.com